Dear Fruzsina:

You wrote about your mother and your grandmother (your mother’s mother, correct?): “she is a worrier and ruminates also, however she tells me it used to be worse when she was my age….my grandma also easily worries”-

this would lead many people to think of anxiety being genetic, after all there is the grandmother being anxious, her two daughters and granddaughter. Genetics? I don’t think so. Not likely.

When a child grows up with an anxious parent, the child feels the parent’s anxiety repeatedly, maybe daily, for years. It makes the child feels… anxious, scared on an ongoing basis.

As a result of this ongoing fear, that is, anxiety, the child feels weak and clings to the anxious parent, afraid to lose them, afraid to be alone.

I think that you are very much that child, feeling weak and clingy. You wrote in your original post: “whenever I am with him while he is being off and wanting to be by himself, I feel SO weak and very clingy and just completely hopeless”- this is what a child feels with an anxious parent.

It is interesting: your mother may very well be a good mother in many ways, but if she has been anxious as your mother, she has passed on that anxiousness to you.

I hope you post again with your thoughts and feelings.

anita